Dean Baker | The Sharing Economy and the Mystery of the Mystery of Inequality - 2 views
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Aurialie Jublin on 27 Jun 14"This is not supposed to happen in a market economy. To encourage efficiency, we would want a proper set of regulations and taxes and have them apply equally to everyone. The point is to encourage people to make profits by providing better products or lower cost services, not to get rich by finding clever ways to evade regulations. In the case of the taxi industry, it may well be the case that the existing regulatory structure is excessive. The industry pushed city governments to restrict the number of cabs so that they could have more pricing power. Other rules, like the insurance requirement and safety inspections may also be excessive. In a context where costs could be easily passed on to consumers there was little reason for the industry to resist the imposition of these burdens. If Uber and Lyft force a re-examination and modernization of taxi regulation in San Francisco and elsewhere, they will have provided a valuable public service. However it can't possibly make sense to have a stringent set of regulations for traditional cabs, while allowing Uber and Lyft to ignore them just because customers order these services on the Internet."